


House Of Cards

by ThoseFiveChicks



Category: Maggot Boy
Genre: AU, Amnesia, Angst, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I'm a horrible person, M/M, So much angst, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 17:46:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseFiveChicks/pseuds/ThoseFiveChicks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything collapsed.<br/>Inspired by chapter ten, page eighteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House Of Cards

**Author's Note:**

> I AM SO SORRY.

"Davey?" Chainey called softly, hesitating a few feet from where he knew Davey's couch was. If he'd been able to knock, it would have been a timid thing, quiet and uncertain, but he was spared at least that by the significant lack of a door. Things had been. . . different between them since it had happened. He'd _never_ been scared to be in Davey's space before, not ever, not when Davey had actually been potentially _dangerous_ , but now. . . now just being around him felt. . . wrong. Even separated by a curtain, there was something very _off_ about the air around Davey, the atmosphere that now hung between them.

There was a shuffle of movement, indicating that the other Aware was now awake, and Chainey turned to go before Davey had even replied.

"I'm up."

_Yeah, yeah, I'm awake, fag, Jesus._

Chainey felt sick.

* * *

Noah had given his condolences. Lazaro had, more grudgingly, given his, but the way he avoided the topic and any mention of Davey at all said and meant more than his grumbled apology. Sam had taken it the worst, couldn't even come by the house anymore, and Chainey couldn't say he minded. Because without Davey falling over himself around her, sorting out his feelings in the most stupid, asshole way possible. . . it would hurt even more than the isolation. It wasn't like they didn't see each other now and then, because they did work for the same _person_ , after all, but now it was usually just glimpses as they passed each other in the hallway and the occasional locked glance across a crowded room. Davey hardly looked at her at all, and Chainey wasn't sure how to feel about that.

He finally had Davey all to himself.

_It felt like hell._

So he hadn't really talked to Sam since it happened. Not until now, anyway.

"How, um. . . how is he?" Sam looked. . . sheepish, really. Uncomfortable. And the nastier part of Chainey wanted her to be, wanted her to feel as horrible as possible for abandoning Davey, and the rest. . . the rest of him just felt sorry for her. It couldn't be easy, dealing with this. It _wasn't_ easy. _He'd_ been there, _he'd_ stuck around, and he knew _exactly_ how difficult dealing with this was.

Chainey almost scowled at her, but something in him changed it so he bit his lip instead, looking away. "Different. _Really_ different. I'm not gonna say _okay_ , because he's _not_ , he's just. . ."

"Different," Sam finished for him, and Chainey snuck her a sideways glance. She was looking down now, studying the floor. Chainey got the sense that she knew what she’d done wrong, that she felt guilty, but that all the guilt in the world wouldn’t make her come back.

But it might make her apologize. “I’m. . .” she began, her voice cracking apart. She swallowed, collected herself, then tried again. “I’m sorry. About not being around. About. . . avoiding him. I just. . . I can’t deal with it right now. I look at him and I just. . . I miss _Davey_.”

“He _is_ Davey,” Chainey said, but even as he spoke the words he didn’t believe them, and the look Sam sent him said she knew it was a lie. But as long as they both knew it, he didn’t mind saying another one. “He misses you, you know.”

Sam shook her head, laughing quietly, in the way someone does when they know the only alternative is to burst into tears. “No, he doesn’t.”

And then she turned and walked out of their lives.

* * *

 It was easier to pretend when Davey was asleep. It used to be just the opposite, that when Davey was sleeping instead of, say, cussing like a sailor or painting or kicking a soccer ball through a Mindless’s head, that you almost couldn’t tell that it _was_ Davey. Davey was energy and passion and loudloudloud emotions, not quiet and sleep and gentle breathing. But now, after everything, it was easier to look at him asleep and pretend he was seconds from waking up with a start, with a _shout_ , with a “fuck you you faggot I’m trying to _sleep_ here.”

But that was all it was.

Pretending.

Chainey looked down as his dreaming friend, his frown softening into a smile around the edges, and reached down, brushing the hair out of Davey’s eyes. His fingers brushed over the rough stitches on Davey’s cheek, and he paused as something deep in his chest– his heart?– started aching.

He almost reached to cradle Davey’s head, to work his hand into his hair, to lean down and press his lips. . .

. . .but then Davey stirred, waking, blinking up at Chainey with an expression that was too soft and too blank and too _not Davey_ , and Chainey put his hand to his mouth instead, trying not to gag.

“Morning,” he said, his voice muffled through his fingers, and Davey smiled up at him– not a smirk, not a big, toothy grin, but a tiny little smile– reaching up to twine his fingers forcefully through Chainey’s.

_Jesus, fag, watching me while I sleep now? Creep-o!_

“Good morning, Chainey. Did you sleep well?”

* * *

Davey kissed him for the first time a week later.

Chainey threw up in the kitchen sink.

He’d liked Davey for the longest time, he’d been the whole _reason_ that Chainey had rediscovered that he was bi, and now. . . now he finally had him.

It was _horrible_.

He loved Davey, the _real_ Davey, the one who threatened to kill people and played superhero and _felt_ with his whole being, with _everything he was_ , and wasn’t a weepy sap because of it but just someone who _cared_. Not this. . . _person_ Davey had left in his wake, flat and cold as a crumpled paper doll.

The day after, Chainey began calling his new boyfriend Jeremiah.

He didn’t even know enough to protest.

* * *

Nobody wished them luck as a couple when they found out. Maybe it was what Jeremiah said, that they just didn’t think zombies deserved a love life, or maybe it was that they recognized the dullness in Chainey’s eyes for what it was. Maybe it was because they knew Chainey was in love with someone who wasn’t there.

It didn’t stop them, though. Didn’t stop this train wreck of a romance from blooming into a poisonous, dying flower. It wasn’t green growth, it was blackened, cracking petals and leaves that fell to the floor, and where romance was a rose this was a blossom of poison oak, making Chainey itchy and nauseous just to touch it. He stayed, though, unwilling to leave what was left of Davey and too desperate to let go of the flower he’d found, be it the one he’d actually wanted or no.

In the evenings, the ones that tasted like sick instead of sweetness, he’d trace his nails over the stitches binding up the side of Jeremiah’s skull, wanting desperately to rip them out and see exactly how much of his best friend was missing under there. Instead, he’d fight the urge, relaxing his grip and letting Jeremiah kiss him, letting him think it was all alright, and choking down the bile burning the back of his throat.

* * *

“I don’t love you.”

It came about a month later, more than a month too late, when Chainey was lying awake next to the person who wasn’t Davey. They were holding hands under the covers, Jeremiah drowning in Chainey’s shirt and Chainey trying to inhale Davey’s hoody. Jeremiah never wore it, said it was too worn-out and ratty, and so it had become the last unpolluted, purely _Davey_ object they owned.

Jeremiah lifted his head from where it was pillowed against Chainey’s shoulder. “What did you say?”

For some reason, it was harder to say the second time. It had been easy to just blurt it out, to put words to his drifting thoughts, but it was more difficult to confirm it. To cement it. To make it true.

Chainey still got it out, though. “I don’t love you. And. . . I never have.” He paused, figured it didn’t hurt to lie a little. “I’m sorry.”

Jeremiah didn’t say anything for a long time after that, long enough that Chainey wondered if maybe he’d fallen asleep, but the way his fingers were digging into Chainey’s side seemed to contradict that. When he finally did speak, his voice was rusty, sharp around the edges, ripping open his throat as the words passed through.

“You like me though, right? At least a little?”

Chainey swallowed, tried to work out what to say– he’d never hated Jeremiah, not really, although it was tempting sometimes, tempting to hate the person who’d taken Davey away from him. In the end, though, he _did_ like him, but not as much– or in the same way– that he liked Davey.

 _Loved_ Davey.

“I. . . yeah, I mean. . .”

Jeremiah hummed in the back of his throat, content enough with the answer, and nuzzled back into Chainey’s shoulder. “Then that’s enough for me.”

 _It wouldn’t be enough for Davey_ , Chainey was tempted to say, but not only would  it have been cruel. . . wasn’t it the _point?_ Davey wouldn’t _have_ to have settled for anything less than true love, because that was what Chainey would have given him. What Chainey _had_ given him, what Chainey couldn’t give to anyone else because he still hadn’t gotten it back.

He held Jeremiah’s hand for the rest of the night and wished it was Davey’s.

* * *

It was Chainey who broke it off.

He didn’t know how he’d managed to work up the nerve, but by the time he actually had the guts to tell Jeremiah it was over they both knew it’d been coming for a _long_ time. He didn’t even seem surprised when Chainey announced he was moving out, just. . . sighed. Like the worst had finally happened and now he could stop bracing for it.

_Don’t let the door smack you in the ass, Chainey._

“I’ll miss you.”

Chainey paused, hand on the door-jam, and stared out into the street.

“I’ve _already_ been missing _you_.”

* * *

Chainey didn’t forget him. He couldn’t, not really. Davey was everywhere, in his thoughts, in his memories, and in his heart, sappy though that was.

_God, Chainey, you’re such a cheeseball._

But it was good to get away from all the constant reminders, from the spray paint on the walls and the boy that wasn’t Davey. Chainey was happier than he’d been in a _long_ time, more content, and although he still _felt_ the gaping hole in his life where Davey used to be, it was better now that he’d stopped trying to stuff something in there that didn’t fit. He just. . . let it be.

And things got better.

He started doing odd jobs around the Institute, discovered he had something of a  talent for working with cars. He couldn’t get a job as a mechanic, not now anyway, but sometimes he could tinker around in the institute garage and that was almost as good.

He liked to dance, too, and he’d found out he was pretty good at it. If he shut himself in his room and turned the radio all the way up, he could drown out everything, every thought, every longing, and just throw himself into the music.

But he could never forget Davey.

* * *

There was a knock on his door, the first time Chainey had ever heard one. He got phone calls, sometimes, but nobody from the Institute ever made the trek down to his apartment just to call him up for testing. He hoped it might be Sam– he missed her, after all– but it was Jeremiah that he saw when he opened the door.

His shoulders slumped.

He’d actually been looking forward to this for a moment.

“I–” he started to say, but then Jeremiah did something he’d never done before.

He smirked.

“God, Chainey, really? Taking advantage of me when I had amnesia?” Davey said, stepping forward into Chainey’s apartment without asking permission. Chainey started to say something, started to splutter out his amazement, his happiness, but Davey cut him off, tugging him down by the shoulders.

“My turn,” he growled, and gave Chainey a kiss he felt in his toes.


End file.
